Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

Just days after the column appeared, Mr. Metcalf said, his editor called to tell him that two major gun manufacturers had said “in no uncertain terms” that they could no longer do business with InterMedia Outdoors, the company that publishes Guns & Ammo and co-produces his TV show, if he continued to work there. He was let go immediately.

“I’ve been vanished, disappeared,” Mr. Metcalf, 67, said in an interview last month on his gun range here, about 100 miles north of St. Louis, surrounded by snow-blanketed fields and towering grain elevators. “Now you see him. Now you don’t.”

This is almost identical to what happened with that Duck Dynasty jackass being suspended by A&E for saying stupid homophobic bullshit, only that story had a “happy” ending — right-wingers successfully rallied to demand that A&E reinstate Duck Dynasty because HOW DARE THEY TAKE AWAY HIS FREEDOM OF SPEECH by… exercising their own freedom to choose what gets aired on their network. And A&E caved, mistaking the conservative outcry for something actually approaching a morally justifiable standpoint.

I anxiously await the protest by Sarah Palin, Brian Brown, and the whole host of conservative loonies to demand that Metcalf’s column be reinstated. I further await the people running interference on the Duck Dynasty issue as being a matter of freedom of speech to say something, anything, about this guy’s column about guns.

This case reinforces my belief that the “gun rights movement” is mostly a product of the weapon manufacturers. And they have a lot of mouthpieces with these (printed) magazines. Remington Arms Company, LLC and Sturm, Ruger & Co. apparently want to remove any impediment to making more money. They must have considered Metcalf’s career a worthwhile sacrifice in order to keep the profits from a few customers who couldn’t pass a licensing course.

I also like how Richard Venola, a former editor of Guns & Ammo, admits that he has given up on rationality. It sounds like he isn’t the only one.

In fairness, there’s just enough wiggle room to argue that the situations aren’t entirely analogous, because Metcalf expressed the “controversial” opinion in question in the very same Guns and Ammo column he was fired from… Not that I think that such subtleties would affect the response of the right wing noise machine anyway, but…

Analogous or not, that Times story is quite something, isn’t it? My favorite part is the quote from former G&A editor Richard Venola: “The time for ceding some rational points is gone.” Yes, folks, straight from the horse’s mouth, here is a gun advocate saying that even if their opponents are right they will continue to argue against, because they are “locked in a struggle with powerful forces” or whatever.

As I’ve said many times in the past, gun advocates have done more to shift me to the left on this issue than any argument put forth in support of gun control. My natural inclination is somewhat ambivalent on gun control (I think gun violence is an epidemic problem, but I also question the efficacy of a lot of the proposed gun control measures at actually curbing the epidemic) but the arguments from the pro-gun side are just so consistently terrible, I find myself agreeing with certain anti-gun viewpoints simply by default.